Frequently Asked Questions

If I may . . . .

Safehold is not Earth. The fact that people keep trying to find historical parallels for events and conditions on Safehold anyway sometimes distracts them from the overwhelming nature of the differences between our own history and that of Safehold.

The primary difference between the situation on Safehold and any situation that ever existed on Earth is that there genuinely is a worldwide faith, subordinated to a single church hierarchy, and accepted without question by virtually every living human being (other than those who had been corrupted by the Brethren of Saint Zherneau). The sheer breadth and depth of the Church of God Awaiting's authority is utterly without parallel in the history of Earth, where even the most extensive empire and/or theocratic state has had neighbors who didn't necessarily subscribe to the same belief system. It is literally impossible to over emphasize the consequences of that difference when it comes to evaluating diplomatic and political decisions in a Safeholdian context.

If the political situation on Safehold were remotely comparable to any political situation which has ever existed here on Earth, this argument that Cayleb should have played for time before declaring his open opposition to and defiance of the Church might — might — make sense. In a Safeholdian context, it almost certainly would have been suicidal.

There are many reasons I say that, beginning with — but certainly not limited to — the observation someone else has already made that under Safeholdian planetary law, Cayleb's accession to the throne had to be ratified by the Church, which was completely under the control (as everyone in Tellesberg knew) of the Group of Four. That confirmation was not going to be forthcoming, and anyone who had the remotest shred of an understanding of Zhaspahr Clyntahn and of the power of the Inquisition knew that. At best, the Group of Four would have immediately denied Cayleb's right to inherit his father's throne. It wouldn't have needed to provide a reason for that; such a denial would have been completely within the Church's prerogatives without the requirement for any secular justification.

The Group of Four could, however, have come up with any number of justifications if they had been needed. The fact that nothing Charis was doing had violated the Proscriptions — in the opinion of Paityr Wylsynn meant diddly in Zion, especially if the Grand Inquisitor himself chose to override the local Intendant's findings. Does anyone think for a moment that Clyntahn would not have chosen to do just that? Even if Clyntahn had not immediately overridden Wylsynn's attestation, he could very easily have announced that a review of the youthful Intendant's findings was in order, particularly given the fact that Charis had managed to devastatingly defeat the combined navies of five other nations. Surely it would have been reasonable for the Church to make certain that such a completely and totally unprecedented victory — and scale of victory — was not, in fact, due to some infringement of the Proscriptions which Shan-wei had managed to sneak past Father Paityr? After all, that would only be the path of caution.

Given that Clyntahn had the bit between his teeth, what would almost certainly have happened would have been what did happen, even without Cayleb and Staynair's open defiance. Had Trynair been allowed to call the shots, however, a rather more subtle — and probably even more dangerous — policy would probably have been pursued. Trynair would have played for time. Rather than rejecting Cayleb's right to inherit outright, he would have set up panels and committees to fully examine the circumstances . . . and he would have demanded a regency to oversee the Kingdom of Charis while everything was sorted out. (Echoes of the Hanth succession from Off Armageddon Reef, anyone?) And, of course, that Regency Council would have obediently followed Mother Church's instructions to stand down its active operations and military preparations against Hektor Corisande during the review process.

Cayleb would then have had only two choices:

(1) Immediately defy Trynair and reject the notion of a regency or a review of the circumstances, at which point his actions would be cast in a purely political view, demonstrating to the Group of Four's satisfaction (for the rest of Safehold) that Haarahld had, indeed, been the true instigator of the imperialist confrontation which had led to the war and that Cayleb, out of pure, unsullied, secular ambition, was defying Mother Church's efforts to heal the conflict which had already inflicted so many deaths upon Safehold and was willing to defy the Writ, the Archangels, and God Himself in the name of that secular ambition.

(2) Accede to Trynair's imposition of a regency and a review of the circumstances, accepting a regency council whose membership was acceptable to the Group of Four, at which point his life would not have been worth a plug nickel and the fate of Charis would have been sealed.

Even if Clyntahn hadn't immediately arranged Cayleb's arrest on some suitably serious religious charges as soon as the Regency Council was in place (or had him assassinated, probably by some "heretic" Charisian, thereby once again justifying Clyntahn's "Permanent Solution to the Charisian Problem"), Trynair would have strung the process out for months or even years, aided by the slow speed of communications (which would become even slower when it suited his purposes), during which the legitimacy not simply of Cayleb but of the entire Ahrmahk Dynasty would have been increasingly undermined in the eyes of the Charisian people. (And, of course, during that same time period, Prince Hektor and King Rahnyld, at the very least, would have been building their own fleets of galleons while Charis wasn't.) Moreover, one of the very first things that would have happened would have been that Maikel Staynair would have been removed as Bishop of Tellesberg and the entire Charisian church would have undergone a thorough housecleaning under the direction of Clyntahn's inquisitors. The very best result of that housecleaning (from a Charisian perspective), would have been that the Reformists would have been purged from the Church and that a degree of orthodoxy probably rivaled only by that of Harchong would have been imposed upon it and through it upon the Kingdom as a whole. A more probable result would have been that the Brethren of Saint Zherneau (possibly along with Jere Knowles’ journal) would have been discovered and destroyed and that Clyntahn would have gone ahead and burned Charis to the ground and sown the soil with salt to destroy the cancer once and for all.

From the perspective of Church preparations, the Church didn't get around to declaring Holy War until well after it had commenced its own massive naval buildup against Charis. There is absolutely no reason to believe for a moment that the Group of Four wouldn't have gone ahead and begun that naval buildup anyway, particularly given the fact that Charis had already flouted the Group of Four's collective will by surviving and that Charis could only continue to survive by eliminating its rivals among the Out Islands — Emerald, Corisande, Tarot, and (presumably) Chisholm. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the original confrontation, whether it was Haarahld's vaunting ambition which had led to the war or not, those four realms (plus Dohlar) were clearly Church allies/clients. The Church had to support and protect them against Charis, both because she had a perceived responsibility to do so and because the Group of Four could not allow an alliance it had created to be defeated by the single secular kingdom it had specifically set out to destroy in the first place. From the Group of Four's perspective, and especially from Clyntahn's perspective, that blow to the Church's prestige, power, authority, and perceived omnipotence would have been completely and totally unacceptable. It would, in effect, have created the very situation he'd proposed Charis's destruction to avoid. So pretending it was simply a war between secular powers would have done absolutely nothing to decrease, limit, or slow the Church's military preparations.

From Charis' perspective, on the other hand, there was no downside at all to Cayleb and Staynair's defiance.

First, bear in mind that they never bade defiance to Mother Church or the Archangels in their original communication to the Group of Four. They specifically accused the Group of Four of corruption, abuse of power, and the perversion of Mother Church. Their defiance of the Grand Vicar was predicated on the accusation that the Grand Vicar was the Group of Four's tool . . . and that situation existed only because of the Group of Four's progressive corruption and perversion of Mother Church. In other words, they were not defying God's plan for Safehold, nor were they rejecting the primacy of Mother Church; instead, they were accusing a specific clique within Mother Church of having connived at Charis' destruction without even first allowing Charis the opportunity due to all of God's children of defending herself against accusations of wrongdoing or seeking clarification of where and how she might have transgressed so that those transgressions could be correct.

From that perspective, Cayleb and Staynair were defending the Church against her internal enemies. They were not defying God; they were being answerable to God in coming to the defense of His Church against those who would have perverted it into something He had never intended it to be.

Second, by declaring their position so forthrightly, they avoided the delays and possible interregnum Trynair might have imposed and which would have absolutely prevented them from taking the steps necessary to fight their other purely secular enemies, far less preparing to defend themselves against the Church's fresh assaults.

Third, every informed political observer on the planet knew that, in fact, the Group of Four had been directly behind the attack on Charis. The "Knights of the Temple Lands" were a political fiction which the Church had used before, and everyone recognized that was what had happened this time, as well. Whatever the consequences might have been at the "grassroots level," the rulers of Safehold all knew who had been calling the shots in the attack on Charis. Bringing that out into the open made the choices clear for all of those other secular rulers . . . and outside Siddarmark, Chisholm, and Charis itself, the "grassroots level" didn't matter a hill of beans. By taking the position they took, Cayleb and Staynair deliberately stripped away any mask the Group of Four might even have attempted to hide behind as far as the important decision-makers of Safehold were concerned. Moreover, by making it a direct confrontation between Tellesberg and Zion, they underscored what Nahrmahn and Sharleyan, at the very least, had already clearly understood: once Clyntahn had destroyed a realm for irritating him, no ruler's crown would ever have been safe from him again. If you think that wasn't a factor in King Zhorj's thinking in Tarot, you are mistaken. (And if you think the realization that Chisholm would be next on Clyntahn's list wasn't a part of Sharleyan's calculations when she considered Cayleb's proposal, I suggest you go back and reread the books! [G])

Fourth, and most importantly of all, it united Charis behind Cayleb in a way nothing else could have. Bear in mind that he wouldn't have been confirmed in the crown at all by the Church under the Group of Four's control, and that he, Staynair, and Gray Hill all knew that as well as Merlin did. His choice was between being denied the crown, facing (and attempting — somehow — to survive) Trynair's delaying tactics, or openly defying the Group of Four. Since both of the first two possibilities would inevitably have led to his defeat and death, it was really a binary decision. But by embracing that decision, he presented himself as the champion of the Church and (although it wasn't harped upon at the time) freedom of conscience. In the end, of course, freedom of conscience and Mother Church's paramount authority over every living human being were fundamentally at odds, but that was not immediately apparent, since everything Staynair was saying emphasized the importance of God and an understanding of His will. The fact that he was already subtly dividing or at least distancing God from "His" Church was far from obvious. In fact, Cayleb's message emphasized the necessity of standing up for God against the corruption of evil and ambitious mortal men who had perverted everything the Church was supposed to stand for. That position, coming on the heels of King Haarahld's heroic death, the fact that virtually every Charisian understood that their kingdom would have been destroyed had the other side won, and the knowledge that the "Knights of the Temple Lands" had been behind the attack, forced Charisians to choose between becoming Temple Loyalists or Reformists in the church of Charis and firmly — one might say fiercely — united those Reformists behind Cayleb and Staynair. It was, for all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the circumstances which would have obtained had Trynair's probable strategy been applied, complete with Regency Council and "delays" in confirming Cayleb as king.

As for the notion that the people of the Temple Lands "quarrel with each other just like any group, or groups of people in power" — oh, please! The "people" of the Temple Lands don't matter squat; the Knights of the Temple Lands matter. They are the rulers, they collect the taxes, they make the decisions, and they don't answer to anything remotely like a parliament. And who are the "Knights of the Temple Lands"? The Council of Vicars, that's who. You know — the people the Group of Four control and dominate? They are going to somehow "quarrel" with Zhaspahr Clyntahn at a time like this? And SWM is correct anyway; the Knights were simply the conduit for funds coming directly from the Church's treasury under the control of the Treasurer . . . who happens to be a member of the Group of Four and would have been covered, anyway, by the instructions the Grand Vicar would have given him, since the Grand Vicar was under control of the Chancellor, who also happens to be a member of the Group of Four. The degree to which the "Knights of the Temple Lands" could have inhibited the Church's cash-flow seems to me to be misunderstood by this argument, as well. The Knights didn't pay taxes or tithes, anyway. The best they could have done would have been to try to somehow prevent the Church tax gatherers from collecting the tithes their subjects paid directly to the Church. I'll let you calculate for yourself how likely they would have been to succeed in that with Clyntahn's Inquisition standing behind Duchairn's Treasury agents. No matter how ardent the Reformists might have been, all they would have achieved by attempting to hamper the Church's collections would have been to give Clyntahn the pretext he needed to move against the Wylsynns' Circle and other Reformists even sooner. Not that there would have been the most remote chance that the Reformists would have tried to impede the collection of tithes.

As far as comparing the threat of Charis to the threat of Siddarmark as a means to dissuade the Group of Four from whatever policy it chose to follow, this too is a nonstarter. Until after the events in A Mighty Fortress, there was never any thought on the part of the Group of Four that Charis might seriously threaten the mainland realms in any military sense. For that matter, the Group of Four's consensus even after the destruction of the Navy of God's fleet en route to Desnair was that Charis could not build both a navy sufficient to control the seas and provide for its own security and an army remotely large enough to threaten the mainland or the Temple directly. The Church could always build — or rebuild — a navy, no matter how expensive that might be or how many times it had to be done; Charis literally didn't have the manpower to build a mainland-sized army, and that was all there was to it.

Because of that, there is no way that the "threat" of a powerful Charisian fleet would have dissuaded the Church from pursuing any policy the Group of Four chose to pursue, and to think otherwise is to completely misunderstand the thinking and perceived military realities of Safehold. Indeed, one of Clyntahn's primary reasons for mounting the Sword of Schueler against Siddarmark was his belief — based primarily on his own, personal longtime suspicion of Siddarmark — that Siddarmark might move from "clandestine" economic cooperation with Charis to open military cooperation. By the time he took action, that suspicion of his had actually taken on a degree of legitimacy . . . but that was due solely to his own actions after Charis' open — and successful — defiance of his authority. Neither he nor any other member of the Group of Four (with the possible exception of Duchairn, who, if you will recall, was consistently outvoted on a three-to-one basis) would have allowed their calculations to be affected in any way by the military threat potential of Charis to their own or the Church's position on the mainland. It was the threat to the Church's (i.e., their own) authority in the Out Islands which had prompted the other three to agree with Clyntahn's "final solution" in the first place; absent a realistic land threat on the mainland (which, as I've just demonstrated, didn't exist in their minds at that time), they would — they could — only act even more strongly to prevent Charis from securing hegemony over all the Out Islands and thus strengthening the danger against which they had acted originally.

In short, there is no way that a delay on Cayleb and Staynair's part in proclaiming their defiance of the Group of Four — and setting forth morally, religiously, and spiritually compelling reasons for that defiance — could possibly have offered them anything like the advantages that accrued from an immediate declaration of war against the Group of Four and its corruption. It was not simply the correct thing for them to do from a moral and an ethical perspective, it was also the best thing they could have done from a pragmatic political, military, and economic perspective.

That's my analysis of the situation, at any rate. And while my natural modesty hesitates to point this out, I probably know more about the internal and external politics of the Church and Safehold's secular realms than anyone else. [G]

The Church provides five years of basic education, but the nature of that "basic education" is not uniform.

The critical thing that the Church teaches is doctrine. Initially, when Safehold was first colonized and the Church was first set up, the Church's teaching role was specifically designed to instill literacy, as well as doctrinal soundness, in order to permit every Safeholdian to read The Writ, The Commentaries, and The Testimonies for himself, the better to understand the Archangels' teachings. It was also essential because they were still very much in the terraforming mode and they needed to be able to read the instructions buried in The Writ. In addition, the literate Adams and Eves wanted and expected their offspring to become literate.

As population expanded beyond the original enclaves and — even more importantly — as individual reading of the holy books began to encourage a small number of independent thinkers, the Church's emphasis shifted from teaching literacy as a primary goal to teaching it as a secondary goal, with increased emphasis on doctrinal reliability as the overriding objective. Doctrinal reliability had become the primary, quintessential, absolutely necessary aspect of the Church's teaching during the War Against the Fallen, following Shan-Wei's Rebellion, so it wasn't a very difficult step for the Church to take to decide that too much literacy was a dangerous thing. Coupled with the expansion of the population, the creation of more "frontier settlements" where being good with your hands was more important than "book learning," literacy began a steady decline which became a drastic decline when the Adams and Eves started dying off.

This suited a significant portion of the Church's hierarchy just fine, since the closer the clergy had to a monopoly on literacy, the tighter its monopoly on doctrine and theology became. That portion of the clergy wanted to create a "closed shop" in which nothing like the Fallen could ever again emerge. Another, smaller, portion of the clergy — centered, ironically, in the Bédardists — argued forcefully against that view, pointing out that Langhorne himself had insisted that God's children had to be literate and that it was the job of the Church to teach right behavior, not simply to dictate right behavior. The Order of Jwo-jeng was mostly on the Bédardists' side; the Order of Schueler was not. As the order directly charged with teaching and guiding Mother Church's children, the Order of Schueler took the position that what mattered most was that right behavior was attained, not necessarily how it was inculcated, and experience had demonstrated that those who read the most also tended to ask the most questions. Admittedly, questions could lead to further enlightenment, but they were also Shan-wei's portal into the minds of believers and so they had to be handled very carefully, on Mother Church's terms, and controlling literacy helped Mother Church control the terms of the discussion.

Opinion was not uniform even within the Order of Schueler, but the view of the Order's senior clergy was strongly against aggressively pushing literacy, and that tended to predominate. A period of competition between the various great orders of the Church began about 150-225 years after the end of the War of the Fallen. It ended, eventually, with the Order of Jwo-jeng being merged into the Schuelerites and the Order of Langhorne losing its primacy to the new, consolidated Order of Schueler, in large part because the Inquisition was firmly in the hands of the Schuelerites. Maikel Staynair's origins in the Order of Bédard actually have quite a lot to do with the high degree of open-mindedness and the belief in teaching and in the individual's responsibility to take charge of his own relationship with God which he's persistently demonstrated. He's moved well beyond the Order of Bédard's official positions, of course, but the order helped create the mindset which made him open to the revelations of the Brethren of Saint Zherneau when the time came.

To return to the matter of literacy, however. In the Out Islands, literacy was always relatively high among the classes for whom it was useful — merchants, lawyers, bankers, skilled artisans, physicians, etc. — although rather more restricted in the lower classes where the manual labor of a muscle-powered society was concentrated. Even there, however, literacy was more prevalent than it was in most of the mainland realms at their nadir and the view persisted that it was a Safeholdian's right to be literate.

In those mainland realms, literacy was most common among the urban classes and least common among the rural classes. It was customary, in most of the mainland realms, for there to be at least one or two literate individuals attached to any large farmstead or small village, with an increasing percentage of literacy as population density went up and the classes for whom literacy was a requirement became more numerous. In addition, of course, the local clergy were always literate, although the extent to which a village under-priest in the Harchong Empire used his literacy skills probably didn't compare too favorably to the extent to which a law master of the Order of Langhorne in Zion used his.

The general uptick in literacy over the last couple of centuries has been largely the result of the steadily increasing density of the urban populations and the economic expansion of which Charis is the face. I use the term "is the face" because although Charis is way out in front, virtually all of Safehold has been participating in a general upward flow of economic activity and prosperity. The Levelers' current activity levels are a reflection of the inevitable disparities involved in an economy which is changing and evolving. However, the view that a good education is a doorway to opportunity has begun to emerge more and more strongly during this period, just as the increasing populations of cities like Tellesberg, Siddar City, Gorath, etc., have increased the need for literate specialists to provide the necessary services to manage those populations' economic affairs, see to matters of public health, provide engineering services, etc.

The general uptick in literacy over the last couple of centuries has also (precisely as the Schuelerites of 600 years or so ago feared) contributed to the Reformist movement. Not so much in terms of questioning doctrine, although there's obviously at least some of that going on, as well, so much as in the Reformists' sense that Mother Church is not living up to the obligations set down in black and white in The Writ as the Vicarate has become more and more enamored of secular power and cliques like the Group of Four have emerged to dominate Church policy.

The poorer and sparser a population, the less likely it is to have a high degree of literacy. This is what Cahnyr was thinking about in terms of Glacierheart. The economy there is so hardscrabble that families can neither afford the cost of providing additional education to their children, nor afford the lost income holding the child out of the labor force would cost them. And literacy, like any other skill, is lost when it isn't exercised, so especially among the lower classes — farmers, coal miners, foresters, etc. — functional illiteracy is still very common because they have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue reading. This is one of the reasons why the Sword of Schueler was more successful in Western Siddarmark. Not only were the western provinces closer to the Temple Lands and therefore more susceptible to infiltration (and strategically more important, leading to a greater concentration of effort in them), but there were far fewer bastions of literacy to help fuel the Reformist movement. As a result, the citizens of those provinces were much more conservative doctrinally and far less likely to be "infected" with schismatic or heretical notions, making them a tool more apt to the Inquisition's hand.

(It should not, however, be assumed that loyalty and support for the Church are the monopoly of "backwoods hicks." Illiteracy makes it easier for the Church to control the thinking of its parishioners, but this is an institution with close to a thousand years of doctrinal and theological writing and study. Some very, very smart people who have spent lifetimes acquiring knowledge and understanding of that doctrine are fully supportive of it, with their belief buttressed by their intelligence and study rather than undercut by them.)

Harchong is a special case. In Harchong, the Church and the local aristocracy have been joined at the hip to an even greater extent than elsewhere on the mainland. Harchong — or what eventually became the Harchong Empire, at least — was the focus of the early population and expansion of Safehold for several reasons, despite the fact (if you look at the map) that its internal communications are relatively poor. Tiegelkamp, Boisseau, Stene, Kyznetzov, and Shwei were primarily grassland and particularly fertile. They required much less in the way of terraforming and land clearance, which made them the heart of Haven's early population growth. The emergence of a strong dynasty in Tiegelkamp which succeeded in uniting all of those separate enclaves into provinces of the same name into Safehold's first true empire during the War of the Fallen — and which put its new, imperial strength behind Langhorne's successors — explains a lot about both Harchong's size and power and its "special relationship" with the Church and with the forces of doctrinal reliability, in particular.

East Haven and Howard — like Charis, Chisholm, and Corisande — had enclaves of their own, and the original canal network constructed by Shan-wei had assumed that East Haven would take the lead in population growth because of the superior possibilities of its river systems where transport was concerned. That's why the original canals built by the Archangels tend to be concentrated in that region, although at least some of those canals (no, I'm not going to tell you which ones) were built after Shan-wei's death in order to provide Zion with better communications rather than to promote eventual economic and population growth. Howard's natural river connections aren't as good as East Haven's, but the climate in what became Desnair was very good, lending itself to a strong agriculture-based economy. Sodar's internal communications are really, really bad, which helps to explain why you haven't heard very much about the mighty Kingdom of Sodar.

Siddarmark grew out of the enclaves scattered through Old Province, Mountaincross, Midhold, Hildermoss, and Markan. There was also an enclave in what became Shiloh Province, but it was not associated with the early growth of Siddarmark. Unlike Harchong, which grew into a centralized empire very early, the "proto-Siddarmarkians" developed more as city states, independent of one another, which turned into the Republic some centuries before our story (and I'm not going to tell you that part of it now, because this thing is already much too long). However, the city states always laid a greater emphasis on individual liberties, participatory democracy, and rivalry with one another (which, however, usually stopped short of military rivalries), and generally emerged as the antithesis of Harchong. The fact that Siddarmark is almost a reverse image of Harchong helps to explain why those in the Church who regarded Harchong as Mother Church's faithful bulwark were more inclined to see Siddarmark as a threat, especially after it began aggressively expanding southward following its initial confrontation with the Desnairian Empire. (You'll get at least some details on the Siddarmark-Desnair . . . relationship in Toil and Tribulation.)

Anyway, the Harchongian aristocracy discovered that an illiterate peasantry and serf class was much easier to control than one which could read. After all, if they could read The Holy Writ, they might also be able to read things like, oh, contracts. For that matter, they might figure out that their beloved overlords weren't exactly living up to the Writ's instruction as to how they were to treat their brothers and sisters in God. As a result, they took steps to actively discourage literacy outside the ranks of the aristocracy and the bureaucratic class which actually manages the Empire, and Mother Church was willing to go along because (1) Mother Church owed the Empire for its support during the War Against the Fallen; (2) it was understood that this was a quid pro quo, under which the Harchongian aristocracy would always have the Church's back; and (3) peasant and serf illiteracy would make it easier for the Church to ensure doctrinal reliability among them.

So, while I apologize for the rather rambling way I got here, the point of my discourse is that literate serfs and peasants are very, very few and far between in Harchong. The village priest and the local Order of Schueler provide not simply what rudimentary education a common born Harchongian gets but also what literate services he requires, which means that while Reformism may be getting a new lease on life in Siddarmark, it has fallen upon almost totally barren ground in Harchong.

At that, of course, my children, explains why Zhaspahr Clyntahn thinks so highly of Harchong. Whatever its other shortcomings, he views the Harchong Empire as an almost bottomless reservoir of religiously reliable manpower, and smart as he is — and he is smart in a lot of ways — his awareness of how the advances Charis has been introducing trump sheer manpower remains sufficiently imperfect for him to fail to recognize that Harchong's sheer size is no longer enough to carry all before it. Or it might actually be fairer to him to say that he does understand that if he doesn't nip the Charisian schism in the bud quickly the genie is going to get thoroughly out of the bottle, destabilizing the system upon which Mother Church's primacy rests, which means he has to employ the Harchongian manpower trump card now to take Charis out before that destabilization devalues his hole card. But he hasn't figured out yet that his hole card's already ultimately devalued if he can't wipe Charis completely out within the next 5 to 10 years. It may even be that he's simply unwilling to recognize that fact because victory — and the extermination of Charis — is the only outcome acceptable to him and that automatically means it is the only outcome God will permit.

You are suffering under a misapprehension in at least one respect: the Border States were not specifically created as a buffer between the Temple Lands and the Republic of Siddarmark. They are a buffer zone, which is why they are collectively referred to as the "Border States," but they were not created to serve as one. Rather, they are states which existed before the Republic expanded to its current borders and which the Siddarmarkians went to some pains to avoid threatening. The Republic has been aware of the "Knights of the Temple Lands" . . . nervousness over the "Siddarmarkian threat" to the Temple Lands for a long, long time. At no time — prior, at least, to the last few years and Siddarmark's pointed exclusion from the Church's preparations for the jihad against Charis — has the Republic ever actually contemplated going to war against Mother Church, however. Not only would it have been impious and almost certainly blasphemous, but the huge preponderance of force the Church is in a position to concentrate against Charis, despite five years of reverses (and the fact that virtually all of the secular rulers of Safehold understand that the Church was actually the initial aggressor in the current war), would always have been available against Siddarmark, especially if the Republic had been so foolish as to attack Mother Church, rather than the reverse.

The Church's anxiety over Siddarmark represents something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Concerned about potential aggression from Siddarmark because of their worry over its perceived Reformist sympathies and the Republic's success against secular adversaries, the Group of Four and the last several decades of its predecessors among the Church's policymakers, have been unremittingly hostile towards the Republic. In the process, they have convinced the last few lords protector and their administrations that the Church sees the Republic as an enemy, despite the fact that the Republic has never intentionally threatened the Church, her territorial possessions, or her security. That being the case, those lords protector have had no choice but to shape their own policies in light of that perceived hostility, and that fact has generated an answering cynicism, distrust, and — yes — defensive hostility towards those policymakers, rather than towards the Church itself. Since those policymakers, like the Group of Four prior to the current unpleasantness, made no differentiation in their own minds between themselves and the Church as a whole, that hostility towards them equated in their view to hostility against Mother Church and thus a potential secular threat to the security of the Temple Lands. This despite the fact that any quick-and-dirty analysis of the potential balance of power between the Church of God Awaiting and any single secular realm ought to have led them to exactly the same conclusion the Republic's leaders had drawn: that any act of aggression against Mother Church would have been one of suicidal lunacy.

A huge part of the Church's current problems stem from the fact that as the Church's leadership has become increasingly involved in expanding and protecting its wealth and secular power, it has systematically undermined the security of the very things it sought to protect. The attitudes the Group of Four so feared among the Out Islands and the Republic are, in fact, a reaction against the perceived corruption of the Church leadership in question, but, even more, a response to the pressures and threats being brought to bear against them by that selfsame leadership.

In other words, to use an ancient cliché, the Group of Four and its predecessors having made their bed, the Church now has no option but to lie in it.

(1) If you start throwing rocks with remotes and someone sees them, you have demons coming out of the woodwork, thereby validating the Inquisition's claim to be representing God's will.

(2) If you start throwing rocks through windows, then the Inquisition will start posting watchmen round-the-clock, at which point you either have to use remotes (demons), human beings (who will be arrested and tortured to death), or Merlin himself (who can only be in one place at a time), or else stop.

(3) Same for stealing food from grainaries or other storage facilities.

(4) The Inqusition has no fields of its own, so if you steal their food, you're stealing every one else's.

(5) If you begin having random acts of sabotage, Clyntahn (as I have suggested elsewhere) will begin making examples of people living in the vicinity. He doesn't believe in demons (or, at least, that God will allow them to operate against Mother Church) so any deliberate sabotage has to be the work of human hands. If the locals weren't part of it, they should be sources of information about who was behind it. If they aren't sources of information, then they probably were involved. And even if they weren't, making salutory examples of folks in the neighborhood should inspire other folks in the neighborhood to start keeping their eyes open so they can provide the Church with clues in future. Defeating such sabotage is God's work and theefore, however distasteful we may find it, we have no option but to do whatever is required of us (with due considration for the provisions of the Book of Schueler) to accomplish that end. Please make plans to attend the auto-da-fe at the end of the street next Wednesday after mass. Thank you very much, the Inquisition,

Now, from a coldblooded perspective, I could easily make a case for Merlin deliberately inspiring Clyntahn to begin conductions barbaric, atrocity-generating "reprisals" against innocent civilians for his own [Merlin's] actions. It would, after all, be a way to accelerate the Temple Loyalists' . . . disenchantment with the Grand Inquisitor and the Go4. It is, however, a cynical maneuver of the kind Merlin (and Cayleb and Sharleyan) despise in Clyntahn himself. And, assuming the Go4 is ultimately defeated and the truth about Merlin (and his capabilities) comes out, then all the people who lost family members to (or themselves suffered from) atrocities which Merlin deliberately induced Clyntahn to commit are not going to be particularly enamored of the "good guys," and rightly so.

Just pointing out that it is nowhere near as simple as some people seem determined to assume that it is. I genuinly have considered most of the possibilities which have been presented and rejected them for reasons which --- in my opinion (but I'm only the author, so what do I know about it?) --- make excellent sense from the perspective of the main characters' morality, ethics, view of their mission, and pragmatic awareness of ultimate consequences for their overarching ojectives.

EDIT: I forgot to add the observation that throwing rocks and open acts of defiance usually only work when (1) the bulk of the population already agrees with those who are doing the defying and is willing to rally en masse to their rescue/assistance in sufficient numbers to offset the "authorities'" preponderance of military power; (2) there is an outside force which can and will intervene on the side of the troublemakers in time to keep them all from being killed; or (3) the people you are defying are the civilized ones, and so hamstrung by their own professed values where truly effective repressive tactics are concerned.

Regimes are seldom overthrown for being too repressive; they're overthrown when, for whatever reason, they are no longer willing/able to adopt effective repressive techniques. Brutality can generate people willing to rebel; it seldom generates successful rebellion as long as the people administering the brutality are free to continue to do so. Mahatma Gandhi would not have fared well against Heinrich Himmler; the Libyan rebels would not have succeeded against Kadhafi without outside air support; and the Syrian opposition will not succeed against Assad as long as someone is willing to sell him bullets and he can find soldiers willing to fire them (or the Western powers miraculously develop the cojones to do to him what they were willing to do to poor, isolated, not-connected-to-Iran-or-Russia Kadhafi).

There are enough moral ambiguities involved in attacking clearly military targets in a way which is going to cause collateral damage and deaths to a putatively friendly civilian population, as in Allied bombing of targets on French soil during World War II. Britain's Bomber Command is demonized in many circles for area bombing of German cities — i.e., cities full of enemy civilians — and then there's that little matter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki could be justified as attacks on military objectives which inflicted those "collateral" casualties on enemy civilian populations. How much worse does the West feel about Stalin's refusal to advance to the liberation of the Warsaw Ghetto when it rose against the Germans? If Merlin & Co. are responsible for actions which cause the Inquisition to respond by punishing people innocent of any complicity in those actions, then they (in my opinion, deservedly) will carry a stigma as indelible as Stalin's from Warsaw.

dis-pen-sa-tion: noun 1.a The act of dispensing. b. Something dispensed. c. A specific arrangement or system by which something is dispensed. 2. An exemption or a release from an obligation or a rule, granted by or as if by an authority. 3.a An exemption from a church law, a vow, or another similar obligation granted in a particular case by an ecclesiastical authority. b. The document containing this exemption. 4. Theology. a. The divine ordering of worldly affairs. b. A religious system or code of commands considered to have been divinely revealed or appointed.


I would direct your attention to 3.a and to 4.b.

Zhaspahr Clyntahn is the "ecclesiastical authority" charged with enforcing the Proscriptions and Church doctrine. He is also the individual who has the authority, under the Writ, to grant dispensations allowing departures — temporary or permanent — from the Proscriptions and doctrine . . . after, of course, prayerful consideration of the Writ and God's will. Remember that it's the Intendant in each archbishopric, invariably a Schuelerite, who passes on the acceptability of new innovations under the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng, but the Intendant can only approve of innovations which are acceptable under currently interpreted Church law. He can't grant an attestation for something entirely new or novel; that sort of decision would have to be referred up the chain to the Office of the Inquisition, and even his decisions to allow something on the basis that it reflects only already approved technology are always subject to review at a higher level. Remember also, however, that Erayk Dynnys couldn't simply overrule Paityr Wylsynn; he could pressure Wylsynn, but only the Office of the Inquisition would have had the authority to overrule him. And the Office of the Inquisition is headed by the Grand Inquisitor, who happens to be Zhaspahr Clyntahn.

(Things are just a little different in the Church of Charis, obviously, but we're not talking about the Church of Charis in this instance.)

So far, Clyntahn is well within the official, legal sphere of his authority in granting dispensations for the use of new weapons, the adoption of new techniques, and even for things like the temporary sabotage of canal locks. There are other things he's doing in which he is at the very least . . . creatively reinterpreting the Writ, such as his imposition of a worldwide embargo against Charisian commerce and his deliberate destabilization of entire realms. Then there's the little matter of assassinations and terrorism, so I think it can certainly be argued that he is far, far outside the spirit of the Writ in terms of meeting his pastoral responsibilities.

(And despite what's currently going on on Safehold, the Writ is really very clear about the "pastoral responsibilities" the Church's clergy are supposed to meet. It's important to remember that the Church of God Awaiting wasn't really established for the purpose of providing the vicarate with cushy, comfortable lifestyles and opportunities for graft.)

Nonetheless, even granting that Clyntahn is off the reservation in several contexts under the normal reading of the Writ, one should also remember what Dunkyn Yairley had to say to Duke Kholman following the Battle of Iythria about how the Writ's rules change in the event of a jihad. It would be very difficult — so far, at least — for any Temple Loyalist to argue that he's exceeded his or the Church's authority or done anything other than what the Writ itself authorizes (where dispensations are concerned, at any rate) in time of jihad.

If anything is going to undermine Clyntahn's authority with the faithful, it's going to be the realization that he's acting in his own self-interest and not in the interest of Mother Church. As long as the Temple Loyalists remain convinced that the things that he's doing, however horrible, are required by the Book of Schueler and the Holy Writ, his actions are unlikely to undermine the Church's authority. Once that tipping point is reached, however, and the Temple Loyalists begin agreeing with the Reformists about the need to rectify the Church's corruption and abuses, everything that he's done will be looked at through a very different set of prisms. As far as the Temple Loyalists are concerned, his actions are unlikely to undermine the Church's authority even then, but at that point, the Counter Reformation will set in, and it will be interesting to see if Church doctrine becomes more or less authoritarian after the corrupt men in Zion have been dealt with.